ChatGPT: Understanding the tool and implications for our classrooms

ChatGPT. By now you’ve probably heard of this latest innovation of artificial intelligence and maybe even seen examples or played with it yourself. We’ve collected several resources to help schools understand the technology and its capabilities and drawbacks, as well as potential implications for schools, teaching, and learning.

Whether this is new information, or you are looking for practical applications, the articles, blog posts, tutorials, podcasts, and threads linked below can serve as a starting point for your research and discussions with faculty.

Understanding what ChatGTP is and what it can and cannot do

• ChatGPTOpenAI
  • This is the actual chat bot. You will need to create an account, and there is often a wait time due to the volume of traffic. The site has its own disclaimer warning of the limitations of the tool including occasionally generating incorrect information, producing harmful instructions or biased content, and limited knowledge of world events after 2021.
• ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about OpenAI’s GPT-3 toolScience Focus
  • “The model is, as you would imagine, restricted to language. It can’t produce video, sound or images like its brother Dall-E 2, but instead has an in-depth understanding of the spoken and written word.”
• ChatGPT Is Not Ready to Teach Geometry (Yet)Education Next
  • “Can ChatGPT provide feedback and answer questions about math in a more tailored and natural way? The answer, for the time being, is no. Although ChatGPT can talk about math superficially, it doesn’t “understand” math with real depth. It cannot correct mathematical misconceptions, it often introduces misconceptions of its own; and it sometimes makes inexplicable mathematical errors that a basic spreadsheet or hand calculator wouldn’t make.”
• EXPLAINER: What is ChatGPT and why are schools blocking it?AP News
  • “The free tool has been around for just five weeks but is already raising tough questions about the future of AI in education, the tech industry and a host of professions.”
• Finally, an A.I. Chatbot That Reliably Passes “the Nazi Test”Slate
  • “ChatGPT has its flaws. A.I. professionals have tricked it into discarding some safety guardrails, mostly via shortcuts. It’s also produced some glaringly wrong answers. It admits people can use it to produce misinformation. It’s struggled to remain up due to overwhelming demand. And it won’t take the bait on various questions about current events, including the FTX debacle.”
• How to get started with ChatGPTTech in Teach
  • A step-by-step guide on how educators can use ChatGPT and sample question prompts to try.
• Is ChatGPT a Cybersecurity Threat?TechCrunch
  • “Many of the security experts TechCrunch spoke to believe that ChatGPT’s ability to write legitimate-sounding phishing emails will see the chatbot widely embraced by cybercriminals.”
• Twitter ThreadAJ Juliani
  • “It crossed 1m users in less than 5 days. Instagram took 2 years to do that. Snapchat 1 year to do that. ChatGPT is exploding onto the scene as an AI tool anyone can use.”
  • “ChatGPT has made it so any work your students must do outside of the classroom (I.e., homework and writing assignments) will have the opportunity for AI to do all the work in seconds. Not in the future. Right now.”

Weighing the possible good and perceived evil

• A New AI Chatbot Might Do Your Homework for You, But It’s Still Not an A+ StudentNPR
  • “There are still many cases where you ask it a question and it’ll give you a very impressive-sounding answer that’s just dead wrong,”
• A Princeton Student Built an App Which Can Detect if ChatGPT Wrote an Essay to Combat AI-Based PlagiarismBusiness Insider
  • “[The app] GPTZero scores text on its ‘perplexity and burstiness’ – referring to how complicated it is and how randomly it is written.”
• As NYC Public Schools Block ChatGPT, OpenAI Says It’s Working on ‘Mitigations’ to Help Spot ChatGPT-Generated TextTechCrunch
  • “In education, the debate has revolved largely around the cheating potential. Perform a Google search for “ChatGPT to write school papers,” and you’ll find plenty of examples of educators, journalists and students testing the waters by wielding ChatGPT to complete homework assignments and standardized essay tests.”
• Can Anti-Plagiarism Tools Detect When AI Chatbots Write Student Essays?EdSurge
  • One student who used Chatbot to complete his college work “guesses that word is spreading quickly among students about how to use ChatGPT to write papers. ‘There’s really no way to stop it,’ he argues. Even some college leaders seem open to revamping how they teach to meet the challenge of AI.”
• ChatGPT: Educational friend or foe?Brookings“
  • Used in the right way, ChatGPT can be a friend to the classroom and an amazing tool for our students, not something to be feared.”
• ChatGPT Passes MBA Exam Given by a Wharton ProfessorNBC News
  • New research conducted by a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that the artificial intelligence-driven chatbot GPT-3 was able to pass the final exam for the school’s Master of Business Administration (MBA) program.
• Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach with it.The New York Times (subscription)
  • “OpenAI’s new chat bot is raising fears of cheating on homework, but its potential as an educational tool outweighs its risks.”
• The College Essay Is DeadThe Atlantic (subscription)
  • “Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.”
• The End of High-School EnglishThe Atlantic (subscription)
  • “The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.”
• The End of the High School EssaySeth Godin
  • “So, now that a simple chat interface can write a better-than-mediocre essay on just about any topic for just about any high school student, what should be done?”
• The Future of AI: What ChatGPT Means for StudentsThe Social Institute
  • “Technology is constantly evolving, and ChatGPT is just the latest example of this. It’s up to us as educators to support students and prepare them for the ever-changing landscape of their social world. How can we teach students to navigate new technology of any kind so that they are truly prepared?”
• Will Banning ChatGPT In Schools Solve The Problem?Education Next
  • This report explains “how ChatGPT works, its advantages, and some potential drawbacks. It will also cover the impact this chatbot has had on society, both good and bad.”

Implications for schools

• 7 Ways Chat GPT Will Impact Education PositivelyAmanda Write Now (podcast)
  • Once you get past the self-promotion of the host’s materials, this podcast offers possible positive impacts, how to prevent cheating and plagiarism, how to talk to students about ChatGPT, and how the teaching of writing will still be important.
• AI Can Write Essays: What Does This Mean for Educators?One Schoolhouse
  • “Organizing one’s thinking is part of every course; teachers can and should consider incorporating AI into this work.”
• ChatGPT Advice Academics Can Use NowInside HigherEd
  • “To harness the potential and avert the risks of OpenAI’s new chat bot, academics should think a few years out, invite students into the conversation and—most of all—experiment, not panic.”
• ChatGPT and Solving Math ProblemsBrandon Dorman
  • “I wanted to investigate how well it can now solve common mathematics problems — not basic computational ones that Google can solve such as ‘how many miles is 15 km’ but actually show/tell me how to solve a problem.”
• ChatGPT is calling. Will you answer?Leadership & Design
  • “Every once in a decade or so we bear witness to a revolutionary technology, and we fail to recognize the implications it has for the future.”
  • In this blog post, Carla Silver of L+D offers a great outline for your next faculty meeting or leadership retreat on how to think about this innovation together. 
• ChatGPT Through an Education LensResource Hub Collaborators
  • This Google slide deck includes several links to resources in categories like curriculum impact, educator uses, ChatGPT challenges, and more.
• ChatGPT Tutorial for TeachersThomas Blakemore (YouTube)
  • This tutorial shows how to ask the program to create comprehension or inference questions about a given text. It also shows how the bot can create a lesson plan on teaching interference with biographies. The lesson plan is automatically generated with a title, materials, objectives, introduction, direct instruction, guided practice, and assessment with time stamps to show how long each section should take.
• Education is about to Radically Change: AI for the MassesGetting Smart
  • “ChatGPT remembers prior conversations so that it can build on previous responses. Vastly different from the first-generation help bots we all experience with online help desks, this step up creates a more natural, interactive and helpful conversation to support both learners and educators.”
  • The article outlines the potential, challenges, and action to be taken by educators and offers discussion points for teachers and school leaders.
• Introducing ChatGPT to Your ClassroomMiddleWeb
  • Kasey Short, from SAIS school Charlotte Country Day, shares how ChatGPT can adapt text for different ages, clarify concepts and generate examples, and provide vocabulary practice.
• No, ChatGPT Is Not The End Of High School English. But Here’s The Useful Tool It Offers TeachersForbes
  • “ChatGPT should kill a certain type of writing, of which the college admission essay is one conspicuous example.”
  • “Think you’ve come up with a good writing prompt? Feed it to the chatbot. If it can come up with an essay that you would consider a good piece of work, then that prompt should be refined, reworked, or simply scrapped.”
• Schools Must Embrace the Looming Disruption of ChatGPTThe 74
  • “Banning ChatGPT is a bit like mandating abstinence-only sex education: It may be well-intentioned, but it’s not going to be effective, and it’s certainly not going to prepare students for the real world. Educators face a choice: They can dig in their heels, attempting to lock down assignments and assessments, or use this opportunity to imagine what comes next.”
• Teachers! Know all about Chat GPTTech in Teach
  • This blog post offers more than 30 ways teachers can use ChatGPT in the classroom.
• The Future of the High School Essay: We Talk to 4 Teachers, 2 Experts and 1 AI ChatbotThe 74
  • “It’s going to force teachers to rethink their practice — whether they like it or not.”
  • “It could upend more than just classroom practice, calling into question everything from Advanced Placement assignments to college essays.”
• These Teachers Think ChatGPT Can Help them Spend Less Time on Writing Reports – and More Time with their StudentsBusiness Insider
  • “When it comes to grading — one of the most arduous yet dull tasks for teachers — AI promises ‘almost instantaneous feedback,’ [helping them] better ‘understand which assignments are the most challenging’ and quickly identify focus areas for further classwork.”
• What Will ChatGPT Mean for Teaching?TheEdSurge Podcast
  • “A new AI chatbot can spit out long-form answers to just about any question, in a way that sounds eerily human. Students are already figuring out they can use it to write their essays, and educators are pondering how to adapt.”
• Yes, You Can Use ChatGPT with StudentsOh Hey Brian
  • Teacher Brian Bennett encourages teachers to find teachable moments with examples in several academic subjects.

Coming soon

• ChatGPT and Generative AI Look Like Tech’s Next Boom. They Could be the Next Bubble.Business Insider
  • “The buzz behind ChatGPT is fueling investment into other generative AI startups…. The business models are unproven, and running AI involves high computational costs.”
• Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate A.I.New York Times
  • “OpenAI is working on an even more powerful system called GPT-4, which could be released as soon as this quarter.”
• OpenAI Begins Piloting ChatGPT Professional, A Premium Version of its Viral ChatbotTechCrunch
  • “OpenAI said that it’s ‘starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT’ as one of the ways to ‘ensure [the tool’s] long-term viability.’”